"Qt has reached another important evolutionary milestone today. We are very proud to announce that Qt 4.8.0 has now been released. Many people have worked long and hard to deliver Qt 4.8.0. Today that hard work reaches final release maturity, and we are celebrating! Featuring Qt Platform Abstraction, threaded OpenGL support, multithreaded HTTP and optimized file system access, Qt 4.8.0 can be downloaded as binary or source packages."

Ah, great. Remember back in the days when the year 2000 was in the future? It went on forever, and then when it was 2000, 2000 wasn't the future. Bummer. Then we were promised decent font rendering in KWord some time in the future, and you say it's here. And I'm like whoa, dude, we're in the future.

The intrinsic problem in the font rendering was in Qt. Qt applied hinting "too early". It needed changes in Qt to fix this problem, not KDE and not KOffice.

Historically, what did and did not get changed in Qt was up to Trolltech. In recent years, this control passed on to Nokia.

The Qt project has only very, very recently (late October 2011) just moved to open governance.

"Today Nokia announced the start of the open governance model for Qt, known as the Qt Project. The Qt Project allows both companies and individuals to contribute to the development of Qt. KDE supports this move and is excited about the possibilities it brings. We have been waiting for opportunities to take a more active role in Qt's future for a long time and open governance will make this easier."